Adaptation is another driver to widespread popularity: as well as Tolkien, it powers the enduring popularity of Jane Austen, readers’ most nominated writer overall, even if Emma slipped behind a host of modern novels, including Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Blood Meridian – your preferred Cormac McCarthy novel at No 28 (although The Road still ranks at 80). And perhaps the timing of film releases also provides a clue as to why Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights places above her sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. (Alex Clark)
[Tied at #26 with Charles Dickens's Bleak House]Jane Eyreby Charlotte BrontëSarah Owen, Cheshire, 54: “The first book I ever read through the night and went to work with no sleep the next day. The sun was coming up as I finished it. All of the emotions: the outrage at her treatment as a child, the hope as she made her way into the world, the repressed longing, the romantic tension, the sting of betrayal – fantastic.” [...][Tied at #14 with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall]Wuthering Heightsby Emily BrontëÉlise Camilla, Oxford, bookshop worker: “Gothic. Shakespearean. Dramatic. Beautiful. I’ve never loved a novel as much as this one … It changed the fabric of my being at 15 and I’ve never looked back.”
“Charlotte Brontë: Senseless Trash,” created by artist Fran Bundey, will be performed on Saturday, June 6, starting at Sapgate Gardens.The 30-minute outdoor production blends theatre, sound and storytelling into an immersive experience that guides audiences through a creative interpretation of the author’s life.Ms Bundey described the piece as difficult to categorise, combining multiple art forms into one experience.She said: “It’s sort of part theatre, part found art, part tour, and with a little bit of silent disco thrown in there as well,”The performance is designed as a promenade show, with the audience moving through the space alongside the performer while listening through silent disco headphones.Ms Bundey explained: “It’s an outdoor promenade show, so I walk around with the audience… and we do a little journey through wherever we are.”The title ‘Senseless Trash’ comes directly from Charlotte Brontë’s own writing, reflecting a moment of self-doubt early in her life.Ms Bundey said she was struck by a letter Brontë wrote after receiving discouraging feedback from poet laureate Robert Southey.She said: “[Charlotte] says she felt a painful heat rise to her face and that the first letter she sent to him was ‘all senseless trash from beginning to end’,”The show imagines the journey between that moment and Brontë’s eventual decision to publish her work, exploring how the celebrated author overcame those doubts.The performance combines historical storytelling with modern influences, featuring field recordings from the Yorkshire moors alongside contemporary music.Audiences can expect to hear “the howling winds at Top Withins” and “the tranquil trickling of nearby waterfalls”, as well as unexpected musical moments. (Jess Blissitt)
Not every love story is a romance.Some love stories—the ones rooted in reality and humanity—are also stories of the cultural fissures in a particular historic moment. They may also show us the ways lovers can sometimes clumsily harm each other, while they barely understand themselves.By reducing Wuthering Heights to a mere romance, Emerald Fennell’s recent film cheats us out of wrestling with the actual issues Emily Brontë put on the page in 1847. These issues—generational trauma, class and race divides, entrenched gender expectations, and abuse from people who love us—are still acutely relevant today. [...]If ever two characters loved each other despite personality disorders and social boundaries, it’s Heathcliff and Cathy. These people are knotted up in dysfunctions we would readily name today: narcissism, dismissive avoidance, codependency. Their story is disturbing, haunting, and beloved because of the flat-out fierceness these two characters have for each other, the consuming obsession and cruel behavior they share, and the exquisite violence of their passion for each other.Fennell’s version diminishes a tale of tortured personalities shaped by hardship, class divides, and probably racism. (Brontë describes Heathcliff as being dark and swarthy, and he’s called a “Gipsy”; that explains a great deal about why his friendship and eventual romance with Cathy were so offensive to their society.)In Fennell’s film, the tall, handsome (and white) Jacob Elordi portrays Heathcliff—which seems especially odd; Shazad Latif, a British-Pakistani actor, is cast as Edgar Linton. Margot Robbie, however, is convincingly willful as Cathy, as merciless and difficult to warm to on screen as the character is in the novel.Where Brontë critiqued the artificial cultural and social barriers people invent and insert between one another—sources of much human pain and suffering—the film neatly lops that out of the conversation.Heathcliff’s brutish rage at the injustice of the poverty he’s been dealt is simply missing here—though that’s part of what fueled him to leave Cathy, go out into the world, make himself into a wealthy gentleman, and return to destroy the prosperous men around him. With this element removed, the narrative loses much of its power. We don’t get to see Heathcliff at his wildest, exacting revenge on the class system that dismissed him and kept him from wedding Cathy. Load-bearing plot elements and essential characters are carved out of the narrative, turning the grand, searing story into a dime-a-dozen romance.There’s none of the book’s redemption here. No scene of Cathy and Heathcliff’s ghosts, wandering the moors together. No tale of Cathy’s daughter finding a more peaceful love with Hareton, who is expunged from the film entirely. No Heathcliff agonizing in guilt after Cathy dies.Set design is extraordinary in places (the fireplace mantel of carved hands!), and costumes—though thuddingly symbolic (we get it, she always wears red, she bleeds to death)—are stunning. The scene of Cathy crossing the moors in her voluminous wedding dress and veil lifted by the wind is a spectacle.Cathy seizes what power is available to her—the power of a woman to attract and use men. Far more vicious in the book, here she manipulates the attention of a rich man, denying herself the man she really loves. She breaks her own heart because of who she wants to be in life. At the same time, she exerts as much agency as her society grants her.Brontë’s story expresses a feminism of sorts, however twisted. But it’s a feminism Fennell leaves unexplored. Cathy has her own justifiable rage at her limited options in life, but the film leaves that perspective in the background.Cathy’s sort of feminism was surely central for Brontë, who created female characters pushing back against the Victorian ideals of feminine behavior that bound the author herself. (She initially published the book under a male pseudonym to bypass 19th-century prejudice against female authors.)She and her sisters Charlotte and Anne created imaginary worlds for their own entertainment, driven by their isolated lives on the bleak and remote moors. Emily wrote the book for herself, and published it only after Charlotte urged her to do so—because they needed the money. One of the most powerful love stories ever, written by a woman for the pleasure of scribbling it down, just for herself.This should be a story about damaged people loving each other savagely and without pause, finding what’s lovable and deserving in each other, despite their many flaws and obstacles. The film should have been an exploration of human passion and what binds us to one another, even in unhealthy ways. Instead, it’s much less. (Pamela Hill Nettleton)
The Australian Standing Stones will be awash with red and black this winter solstice as locals gather to channel their inner Kate Bush for Glen Innes’ first-ever Wuthering Heights Day.Organised by Shimmy in the Glen’s Helen Tucker and Lisa Wilson, the event invites people of all ages and abilities to recreate the iconic dance from Kate Bush’s 1978 hit Wuthering Heights in one of the region’s most distinctive locations.While Wuthering Heights Day events have become a global phenomenon, this will be the first time Glen Innes has joined the fun.“Lisa and I have often seen other people in other places doing it regularly,” Ms Tucker said.“We have plenty of friends that do it and we were like, ‘We must do that one year, we must do that one year.'”The idea gained momentum after a conversation with Standing Stones Management Board member John Rhys Jones.“I said, ‘We’re thinking we might do that this year,’ and he just jumped for joy,” Ms Tucker said.“He was like, ‘Yes, love it.’ And he said, ‘Please, can we do it with solstice?'”The answer was an easy one.“So we decided we would go with it.”The quirky celebration traces its roots back to the United Kingdom, where a group of fans gathered in 2013 to recreate Bush’s famous music video in an attempt to set a Guinness World Record.“Essentially it started in 2013 when a group in the UK decided that they would reenact Kate Bush’s dance from Wuthering Heights for a Guinness World Record of the most number of people dressed as Kate,” Ms Tucker said.From there, the idea spread around the globe.“Everybody just thought it sounded like such a good idea that it grew and it goes around the world.”Ms Tucker believes the singer’s enduring popularity is helping attract a new generation of fans.“I think people of a certain age certainly remember when the video came out and that it was a big deal,” she said.“But I think the fact that her Running Up That Hill song was in Stranger Things, and of course with the Wuthering Heights movie coming out this year as well, it’s kind of even the younger people know about it.”For those worried they might not have the dance moves, organisers have a simple message: don’t be.“Not at all,” Ms Tucker said when asked if participants need dancing experience.“We’ve also got some people who have already said, ‘I’m not up for the dancing, but I want to get dressed up and come anyway.’“So it’s completely up to people as to how active they are.”Participants are encouraged to wear anything red and black and simply enjoy being part of the spectacle.“We’re just encouraging as many people as possible to come along and just to wear anything red and black so that they can be part of the colour.”Free dance classes will be held at Glen Innes Town Hall in the lead-up to the event, with sessions scheduled for Tuesday, June 16 and Thursday, June 18 at 5pm, and Saturday, June 20 at 10am. Participants can attend one class or all three, and online tutorials are also available for those wanting to practise at home.The festivities will follow the Standing Stones’ winter solstice activities, including the solar noon ceremony, before dancers take centre stage at midday.“My plan is that we’ll actually do the dance and then we’ll probably play the Running Up That Hill song and run up the hill,” Ms Tucker said.“And then come back down again, maybe take a few photos and then probably do the dance again.”With organisers also hoping to capture drone footage of the colourful gathering against the backdrop of the Standing Stones, the event promises to be one of the more memorable ways to mark the shortest day of the year.As Ms Tucker puts it: “We just thought it was a bit of fun.”Wuthering Heights Day will be held at the Australian Standing Stones on Saturday, June 21, with dancing beginning at midday. Everyone is welcome. (Penelope Shaw)
by Pam LockEdinburgh University PressISBN: 9781399502221 (hardback)Ebook (app): 9781399502252Ebook (PDF): 9781399502245May 31, 2026This book explores the fictional figure of the drunkard and why it was so important to Victorian thinking about what it meant to be human. From Jos's life-changing hangover in Vanity Fair to Henchard's twenty-one-year pledge of sobriety in The Mayor of Casterbridge, habitual drunkards were defining characters in nineteenth-century novels and short stories, creating chaos, joy, comedy, suffering and often their own destruction in works by authors like Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope. Fiction played a key role in Victorian political discourses about the place of alcohol in society, fuelling the battle between temperance campaigners and defenders of moderation and pleasure, as well as disseminating and challenging new medical understandings of alcohol's effects on the body and mind. By examining gendered and classed representations of drunkenness, The Drunkard in Victorian Fiction and Culture also documents how women and working-class drinkers were portrayed more harshly than their male and higher-class counterparts, reflecting wider religious and moral prejudices of the time. Pam Lock demonstrates the importance of studying literary drunkards both as evidence of Victorian attitudes to alcohol and as cautionary figures that remind us of the fragility and preciousness of life.
Part II: Gender3. The Dangers of Drink: The Brontës’ Drunken Men
6th & 7th June 2026 • 11am – 4pmThornton Art Trail returns for a vibrant weekend celebrating creativity, community and the rich artistic spirit of our village. Homes, studios and businesses across Thornton will open their doors, inviting visitors to wander, explore and enjoy an inspiring walk through our historic streets.
At the heart of the trail, the Brontë Birthplace will be welcoming visitors free of charge to enjoy the work of four exceptional local artists. Although house tours will pause for the weekend, the rooms themselves will become intimate gallery spaces filled with colour, imagination and Brontë‑country creativity.
In the Posh Parlour, artist Teresa Flavin will showcase her beautiful mixed‑media paintings—rich, atmospheric works that echo the textures and stories of the landscape.
In the Scullery, Matt Gibbons Photography will exhibit his striking wildlife and architectural pieces, capturing the character of Yorkshire’s creatures, buildings and hidden corners with warmth and precision, including his award-winning photographs of the Birthplace renovation.
SATURDAY 6th – 11am & 1:30pm
Charlotte Brontë – Senseless Trash tour
Join Charlotte Brontë on a phonic field trip over the Yorkshire Moors and listen in to the sounds that shaped the Brontë sisters’ lives. The howling winds at Top Withens, tranquil trickling of nearby waterfalls and the angelic tones of…Beyoncé will accompany you on your journey. Senseless Trash from beginning to end – don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Times: 11am (Book for 11am) and 1:30pm (Book for 1:30pm)
SUNDAY 7th – 11am & 1pm
Upstairs in Charlotte’s Room, award‑winning poet Emma Conally‑Barklem will give readings of her Brontë‑inspired poetry, bringing voice, rhythm and emotion into the very space where Charlotte herself once lived. Booking not required.
Most people arrive in Haworth for the Brontës. They walk up the cobbles, visit the Parsonage, admire the moorland view, and then leave. And that’s perfectly fine, but it barely scratches the surface. Haworth in 2026 is having a genuine moment, with Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, released February 2026) reigniting global interest in the village and the moors that inspired it. Whether you’re visiting for the literary pilgrimage, the steam railway, the walks, the food, or all of the above, this guide covers everything worth knowing about one of Yorkshire’s most popular tourist spots. (Alexis Wilson-Barrett)
Manana Aslanishvili, Georgian Technical University, Georgia, manana.58@mail.ruIRCEELT 2025: 15th International Research Conference on Education, Language and LiteratureEmily Bronte was a prominent English novelist and poet of the 19th century, best known for her only novel, “Wuthering Heights”, now regarded as a classic of English literature. The novel was published under masculine pen name, Ellis Bell, in 1847. “Wuthering Heights” is a story of revenge and doomed love. It features harsh moments of cruelty and sexual passion. Although published during the Victorian period, “Wuthering Heights” deviated from the literary norms of the time as it exceptionally represented different aspects, raised diverse questions and addressed more serious issues than those that concerned Victorian era. Instead of celebrating the spirit of the Victorian age, the novel skillfully portrays and reflects more practical and vitally important aspects of people’s lives such as love, hate, revenge, personal relationships, and friendship. The novel depicts the power and passion of intense love as well as the dark and evil side of human nature. It revolves around the love relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff, the climax of which is a tragedy since the love ends up in revenge. The reunion in death of the two lovers constitutes their achievement of complete freedom and love. Though, Emily Bronte published only one novel, “Wuthering Heights” (1847), but that single work has its place among the masterpieces of English literature.
If you were confused by all the bondage and masturbation in Emerald Fennell’s controversial Wuthering Heights film released earlier this year, look no further for explanations than this quietly punchy biography of the 19th-century masterpiece’s author, Emily Brontë.In The Dark Night, we see her scribbling violent pornographic sketches in the middle of Latin translations, while her brother Branwell draws men seemingly participating in acts of group self-pleasure. The Brontës, biographer and Victorian scholar Deborah Lutz shows us, were racier than they looked.Unlike Fennell’s protagonists though, this book suggests that Emily’s interest in all this was not really erotic but more a kind of existentialist exploration of what bodies are, where they begin and end. She was obsessed with the transience of the flesh, following the early loss of her mother Maria, who died when she was just three. “These seven months with her mother in a liminal state – almost dead but still with the living – would stay with Emily,” writes Lutz. “Where did life end and death begin?” [...]“Thoughts of leaving the body behind occupied Emily,” Lutz continues. Later Emily would write in one of her best poems: “I’m happiest when most away, I can bear my soul from its home of clay.” The prospect of a soul freeing itself from its corporeal home sparks in her a sort of literary ecstasy, that is surely at the root of Heathcliff’s obsession with Catherine’s ghost and corpse in Wuthering Heights.The book is not solely focused, however, on how Emily’s experiences shaped her one and only novel. Lutz’s patient prose does not rush to a reductive affinity between her life and her life’s work. It is more interested in the siblings’ lives, how they convened and diverged. Their parents were unusually keen, for the time, on educating girls, and the house was always full of reading and writing. The young girls invented a fantasy land called Gondal ruled mostly by women, where they honed their female-centred storytelling skills. [...]Lutz writes: “The fact that these novels were all hammered out in fellowship, one mixed with competition and love would make [the idea that they strongly influenced one another] not at all surprising.”Although Lutz acknowledges the much-written-about “tussle” between the “usually reserved Emily” and her more sociable sister Charlotte (a teacher wrote that Emily exercised “a kind of unconscious tyranny” over Charlotte), she is also at pains to emphasise this “fellowship”. So often Emily Brontë is painted as singular and isolated, but what Lutz makes clear is that Wuthering Heights was written in anything but a vacuum.Lutz is intermittently hampered by a lack of actual evidence. As was common at the time, Emily’s letters were burned by her family following her death (mere months after the publication of Wuthering Heights) to protect her privacy, and there are moments where the speculations feel far-reaching: “Emily’s feelings about her time abroad remain unknown. But the experience had to have been momentous.”Still, we get a good sense of her personality, even if it is often gleaned from piecemeal sources. Yes, she is introverted, but also “intensely loveable”, writes Ellen, Charlotte’s best friend. Passionate about nature and animals, she is “a night-sky obsessive” who adopts a falcon and carries her books up to the moors, bestowing on plants an anthropomorphic sensibility (a bluebell is “a sacred whatcher”).She is ferociously intellectual but a skilled housekeeper and keen observer too of the domestic in her writing. In the end, Lutz finds, Emily Brontë was both as reserved and eccentric as she has typically been painted, but more complex too. Charlotte perhaps put it best when she wrote of her sister: “Emily loved the moors… She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was… liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils. Without it she perished.” (Francesca Steele)
Deborah Lutz's The Life of Emily BrontëFri Jun 5th 10:00am - 11:00amQueen Street Methodist Church : Scarborough, Queen St, Scarborough YO11 1HQ, UKDEBORAH LUTZ In conversation with Helen Boaden. At the opening event we immerse ourselves in the world of Emily Brontë. Scholar, author and Brontë specialist Deborah Lutz is here from the USA to share her expertise and introduce her new book This Dark Night. The first full biography of Emily in over two decades, it reveals the events, delights and tragedies of the Brontë world which inspired her writing and offers a fresh take on her short but momentous life. A must-see event for all lovers of Brontë storytelling.
Essie Fox, Wuthering Heights ReimaginedFri Jun 5th 12:30pm - 1:30pmQueen Street Methodist Church : Scarborough, Queen St, Scarborough YO11 1HQ, UKESSIE FOX In conversation with Gerry Foley. You thought you knew Wuthering Heights… what if you were wrong? Staying in the Emily Brontë theme we welcome queen of the gothic and bestselling author of seven historical novels, Essie Fox. Essie has reimagined the Brontë classic from a new angle; in the narrative voice of Catherine Earnshaw. Essie’s novel Catherine is a haunting and atmospheric retelling. Nelly Dean told only half the story…this version sees Catherine rise from the grave to tell her own.
This piece brings together Jane Eyre and a modern-day fan convention. What first sparked that idea for you?Several years ago I became aware of several new film adaptations of Jane Eyre and even though I’d read it at school I wondered why it was so enduringly popular. Going back and re-reading made it clear that the rags to riches narrative was very compelling as is the complex central character of Jane Eyre, a plain and humble heroine. I discovered that Jane Eyre is the second most produced and adapted novel, after Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. It was then a natural leap to imagine obsessive fans/readers wanting to have their own convention where they could actually be the character they loved and follow her difficult path to happiness. [...]Jane Eyre continues to inspire such passionate audiences. What do you think keeps people returning to it?I think people just love the idea of an underdog being successful. Ordinary people can relate to Jane’s humble beginnings and be inspired by her extraordinary character and determination in the face of adversity. It’s also a story about women and class so we can appreciate the inequalities of her time and how she navigates that.Inviting audiences to bring “bonnets and emotions” creates a very particular atmosphere. What kind of experience are you hoping people step into?The wearing of bonnets is of course entirely optional and there are also imaginary bonnets beneath each seat. It’s a way of bringing the re-enactment convention to life and allowing the audience to feel part of the story and the convention. They are addressed as if they are fellow attendees and invited at various points to join in with the various strong emotions being expressed. The majority of the team are also drama therapists so they are used to facilitating emotional release. This is not therapeutic theatre per se but it may have a mildly therapeutic effect.Beneath the comedy, the show explores the dilemmas and emotions within Jane Eyre. What conversations are you hoping to open up through that?The piece is of it’s time but the plot device of a first wife and black woman locked in the attic feels like it should be explored so we attempt to rehabilitate Bertha and give her a voice. We also explore Charlotte Brontë’s early feminism as expressed through Jane. We know that originally the novel was published under a male pseudonym as women were not considered capable. The play then looks at how male voices are still louder and more powerful via the characters at the convention and the arguments/conversations they have. One character has a boyfriend who we learn is fairly abusive and controlling which echos some of the characters in the novel.
The issue here is rarely about the acting talent involved, but rather the cumulative effect of current beauty standards on the performer’s face. Take, for example, the recent discourse surrounding Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights. The casting of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi prompted significant online discussion, with some viewers noting that their appearances, while undeniably striking, felt jarringly modern.They appeared less like inhabitants of the desolate Yorkshire moors and more like figures poised for a contemporary social media grid. Similarly, the criticism directed toward Dakota Johnson in her adaptation of Persuasion (with very arched eyebrows) highlighted how modern grooming and the omnipresence of current cosmetic trends can shatter a narrative’s historical illusion. When the faces of our protagonists are so visibly shaped by today’s beauty trends, it becomes difficult for the viewer to suspend their disbelief. (Treya Sinha)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte BrontëWhen Charlotte Brontë released her Gothic romance in 1847 under the male pseudonym Currer Bell, it became an instant bestseller but deeply divided Victorian society. Critics were absolutely horrified by the sheer independence and fierce determination of the main character. One reviewer even claimed it would be no credit to anyone to be the author of such a book. The massive scandal centered around the fact that Brontë placed genuine intellectual power, passion, and authority squarely into the hands of a young woman who dared to overstep conventional rules. Conservative readers viewed this display of female autonomy as entirely anti-Christian and anti-authority. Personal opinion: this is the best part because the exact qualities that nineteenth-century critics attacked as vice are the precise reasons why millions of readers still love the book today. (Jesús López)
I’ve been a fan of Gothic literature since before I even knew what the word meant. When I was eight or nine our family listened to Dracula (an abridged version) on a road trip; I was reading The Secret Garden for fun when I was ten. Together, those served as my gateway drug, leading me to the trashy Goth wonderland of V.C. Andrews, and then to Jane Eyre, which I read in the basement guest room of my grandparents’ house in the mountains, a place only reachable by a narrow, winding road.
Thu 4 Jun, 6:30pmBrontë Event Space at the Old School RoomThis Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë – a rare event with globally renowned scholar, author and Emily Brontë expert Deborah LutzCome along for your chance to meet the globally renowned Emily Brontë expert Deborah Lutz and be among the first to hear her speak about her just released book This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë (publishing 28th May and available to buy from the Museum shop).The first full biography of Emily Brontë in over two decades,This Dark Night is unique, eye-opening and offers a fresh take on her short but momentous life.In this event, Deborah Lutz will take you inside the world of Emily’s irrepressible spirit and wild imagination like never before. Deborah will be in discussion with Yvette Huddleston offering illuminating readings of Emily’s poems and a greater understanding of the politics and events of the era, as well as the delights and tragedies of family life that Lutz shows directly inspired much of Emily and her sisters’ writing in her book.
Or perhaps read old books that continue to define our world, old books that feel profoundly new. Frankenstein resonates with those of us concerned by the inflated egos of any given tech bro. Critics tend to focus on the philosophy of the novel, the vitalism, the social contract of it all, but Mary Shelley writes with prose that feels sharp enough to perform surgery. Or turn to Wuthering Heights, a novel that reinvented the novel several times over, a book that speaks to contemporary narratives of class and race. [...]Good reading begets better reading. In The Novel: a Biography, Michael Schmidt writes: “Reading is a cumulative act, adding skills, increasingly creative as it goes. To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure.” The more you read, the richer the reading. You’ll start to appreciate how novels speak to each other. Connections will often appear obvious, as Wide Sargasso Sea responds to Jane Eyre.
15. Jean Rhys published her acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a postcolonial response to Jane Eyre.
It seemed to me that the origins of writing could be found in episodes from childhood. It also seemed that recounting this episode, which caused me lasting shame and guilt, might provide a key. That last sentence shows that this attempt failed. In truth, I spent my entire childhood making up stories—of which I was the heroine—inspired by the ones I read in books. But those weren’t frightening. I transported myself to distant lands, into aristocratic circles, or into the past, to the time of horse-drawn carriages, or even to the first humans. I imagined that I was Scarlett O’Hara or Jane Eyre, wandering in the desert, on the streets of Calcutta, living in a cabin in Alaska. . . . When I actually started writing, it wasn’t to invent stories, or to project myself into fiction—which I’d always wanted to do. On the contrary, it was to interrogate reality. I wasn’t trying to move or horrify readers, only to uncover a hidden truth. In this story, I shed light on a form of cruelty in which I was involved. (Deborah Treisman)
From the minute the spirited and energetic cast clatter onto the stage in their proper Yorkshire boots, we are transported to the wild moors of West Yorkshire. The cold, austere atmosphere of the parsonage in Haworth is filled with the edgy, excitable spirit of the Brontë family.The play follows the efforts of the sisters to become published authors and is an intriguing recreation of their journey to success focussing on the part Anne played. It is humorous and poignant and has a remarkable gift to make these incredible writers come to life in front of our eyes. The modern interpretation - first produced at The National Theatre in 2024 - goes behind closed doors to reveal the dreams, fears and aspirations of this most talented of families. (Linda Shaw)
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Editor: Robert C. EvansSalem PressISBN: 978-1-63700-073-1January 2022The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, are well known English poets and novelists of the nineteenth century. This volume closely examines Charlotte’s masterpiece Jane Eyre, Emily’s influential Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, to give readers a deeper sense of the themes throughout these important works and the influences behind their creation. Common themes throughout the sisters’ works are love, gender, class, and the intersections of all three, and this volume explores these topics and more, setting the work of the Brontë sisters into various contexts, such as biographical, historical, social, cultural, and aesthetic.
- “The air swarmed with Catherines”: Moving Words and Stereoscopic Narrative in Wuthering Heights, by Kara M. Manning
- The Myth of the Brontës, by Brandon Schneeberger
- “It is only English girls who can thus be trusted to travel alone”: Class, Travel, and Work in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, by Sarah McNeely
- Lucy Snowe in Belgium: Work and Colonialism in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, by
Sarah McNeely- Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor: Overbearing Men and the Gleam of Female Intellect, by John Rignall
- Emily Brontë: The Man Branwell Should Have Been, by Tracy Hayes
- The Experience of Marriage in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Jeremy Tambling
- Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë: A Survey of Editorial Introductions, 1950–1989, by Robert C. Evans
- Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë: A Survey of Editorial Introductions, 1990–2020, by Joyce Ahn
- Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë: A Survey of Editorial Introductions, 1950–1989, by Robert C. Evans
- Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë: A Survey of Editorial Introductions, 1990–2020, by Joyce Ahn
- Charlotte Brontë’s “Other” Novels: A Survey of Editorial Introductions, 1974–2008, by Robert C. Evans
- Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë: A Survey of Editorial Introductions, 1969–2020, by Robert C. Evans
- The 1996 Film of Jane Eyre: A Survey of Reviews, by Jordan Bailey
- The 2009 Film of Wuthering Heights: Critical Problems and Possibilities, by McKenna Odom
- The 2011 Film of Wuthering Heights: A Survey of Reviews, Mikia Holloway
Deborah Lutz’s new biography of Emily Brontë — the first such work in over two decades — offers a considerably more nuanced portrait of this individual woman and idiosyncratic writer. Bronte is in good hands: Lutz, an English professor at Penn State University, excelled with her innovative 2015 book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects. Now, with This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life, Lutz has sharpened her gaze and drawn on previously unavailable manuscripts and notebooks to produce what is arguably the most comprehensive study to date of the enigmatic author of Wuthering Heights. [...]Some of Lutz’s standout chapters are on Wuthering Heights. [...]This Dark Night will appeal to all sorts, from the Brontë lay reader to the Brontë aficionado. It should be required reading for those who cast doubt on Brontë’s genius after having only experienced (or endured) Emerald Fennell’s recent overwrought and underwhelming film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, a textbook example of style over substance. Along with her analysis of Bronté’s “weird, witchy” masterpiece, Lutz provides insight into her mesmerizing poetry. At regular junctures, she reveals how Brontë’s life informed her art. The loss of her mother at a young age engendered a question that Brontë would grapple with throughout her career: “Where did life end and death begin?”Lutz makes clear at the outset that certain chapters of Brontë’s story remain a mystery. At the age of 16, she got into trouble. About this incident, Lutz speculates that she may have become romantically entangled with a young man, “or a young woman.” Most of Brontë’s papers were lost, possibly destroyed, after her death, which prompts Lutz to wonder if she had started a second novel and stashed this unfinished work behind a wall panel in the parsonage or even secreted it out on the moors.Despite the gaps, Lutz utilizes a range of sources to convincingly flesh her subject out. We come away from this riveting biography with the awareness that a prodigious talent was snuffed out prematurely. We might wince as certain traits and themes are described as “Emilian,” but otherwise it is hard not to be captivated by the Brontë that emerges. She may have been that “untameable spirit”: We see instances where she doesn’t suffer fools — or, in one jaw-dropping case, disobedient animals. But she was also fiercely intelligent, independent, principled, and driven. Martha, the Brontës’ servant, conceded she was “self-willed … but devoted and kind.” As a woman, she was out of step with her own time, but as a novelist, she was way ahead of it. (Malcolm Forbes)
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by Sarah Danielle AllisonColumbia University PressISBN: 9780231209717 (Paperback)ISBN: 9780231209700 (Hardcover)ISBN: 9780231558075 (E-book)August 2025Literary celebrity in the nineteenth century emerged from a miscellaneous array of trending print forms, including antislavery writing, which was a popular, consumable form of literature in the period. Antislavery print culture could function as a pop culture, leveraging cultural myths about gender and authorship through print forms that connected readers with writers: printed collections of author signatures, descriptions of writers’ homes, autobiography, biography, and travel writing. The Rise of Celebrity Authorship traces surprising relations among figures and across shared forms in the period: What do antislavery forms and figures tell us about literary celebrity and the networks of transatlantic print culture?Sarah Danielle Allison illuminates the collective creation of celebrity by tracing unexpected connections within this anarchic nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Bringing together book history with more recent computational approaches, The Rise of Celebrity Authorship shifts focus from the conventional literary work of major writers to the breadth of print forms circulating around them. Allison considers a variety of texts adjacent to the novel, including Edgar Allan Poe’s satire of autograph collecting, antislavery gift books, and a Southern travelogue by the Swedish writer Frederika Bremer. She draws striking parallels between two starkly different 1858 texts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, which sought to unearth the reality behind Jane Eyre, and Josiah Henson’s autobiography, which circulated as the life of the “original Uncle Tom.” A rich account of the competing and complementary forces that shape images of authors, this book reveals the collaborative work of literary production and celebrity.
5. A True History of Jane Eyre: The Collaborative Posthumous Creation of Charlotte Brontë
After Wuthering Heights became one of the biggest 2026 movie releases and available to watch on streaming, it’s interesting to know more about the behind-the-scenes of it all. In an interview with Refinery29, Robbie said there was one scene when she and Elordi knew they “got it” as an on-screen couple:There were a couple of moments. Even on day one. [We shot] the first scene in the movie where Cathy flings open the bed hangings, and [Heathcliff is] lying in bed. And then we ended up cutting this bit but I walked up over him, and then crouch down and got like this close to his face and told him to, ‘get up, we've got neighbors,’ or whatever it was.What a wild, fun fact! I would think they’d want the moment the Wuthering Heights co-stars really clicked on set to be kept in the movie, but then again, part of what makes this film good is all the yearning. As Robbie explained:And we cut that bit because the proximity is something we wanted to save. But, I mean, that was day one, and even then, everyone was kind of like, ‘Whoa.’ And we were like, ‘Okay, I think this movie's gonna work.’ Also just because she's throwing something at him, and he's throwing it back, and he's like, ‘What?’ There was already an intensity between them that I think we could build on from that point.Oh, but now I want to see this scene! I could totally see these two characters getting too close for comfort while in their shared home without even realizing it, since they grew up together, and then kind of pulling back in more public-facing moments. That being said, I totally trust that if that wasn’t the right move for those characters, it wasn’t right for the movie either. What a good feeling that must have been, though.When CinemaBlend had the chance to speak to writer/director Fennell, we asked her why it takes so long for the pair to kiss, and she said it was important that she make it “frustrating” for the audience to see these two share scenes but not get intimate yet because “the wait is the fun.” And during our chat with Robbie and Elordi, they told us they think Heathcliff and Cathy fell in love in their very first scene together when they were kidsWhile it’s easy as an audience member to yell at the TV screen, “just kiss!” in the context of the story – which isn’t really supposed to be an epic romance – they are from two different class systems, and it was considered wrong for them to decide to be a couple or fraternize before marriage. Ultimately, while we yearn for these two, they have an incredibly tragic story. But it’s entertaining nonetheless! (Sarah El-Mahmoud)
Hindley Whips Heathcliff- ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Andrea Arnold, 2011)Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of literature that has never gotten the adaptation that it deserves; while this is in part due to the fact that almost none of the film versions bothered to include the second half of the novel, they’ve also avoided the racial subtext that is critical to understanding the intentions that Emily Bronte had. Andrea Arnold was bold enough to approach these themes by casting a mixed-race actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff, and showing how he is harassed and insulted with racial epithets.The strongest scene in the film involves Heathcliff being whipped by Hindley (Lee Shaw), Catherin’s (Kaya Scodelario) older brother. Hollywood has clearly decided to treat Wuthering Heights as a romantic epic (which it isn’t), and have whitewashed and streamlined subsequent adaptations; Emerald Fennell’s film doesn’t just ignore the racial commentary, but doesn’t even include Hindley as a character/ (Liam Gaughan)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte BrontëWritten in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell, this novel follows a fiercely independent orphan who refuses to let a restrictive Victorian world break her. After surviving a cruel childhood and a harsh boarding school, Jane takes a job as a governess at Thornfield Hall. That's where she meets her brooding employer, Mr. Rochester. Their emotional connection is incredibly deep, but it gets completely derailed by hidden family truths and intense societal pressures.I know it sounds weird to call a classic gothic tale cozy, but watching Jane fight for her personal freedom and moral clarity while falling deeply in love is deeply satisfying.Wuthering Heights by Emily BrontëThe Brontë sisters were having an absolute moment in 1847, because that was the exact same year Emily published her only novel under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. This book trades the polite ballrooms for the wild, windy English moors, delivering a story built on raw passion, class divides, and relentless retribution.The central relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and the brooding Heathcliff is famously messy, showing just how destructive love can become when social structures tear people apart. Honest take: it's definitely darker than a standard ballroom romance, but the sheer emotional intensity will completely pull you under. (Jesús López)
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‘Between her and the world’: Legacies, Interpretations, Adaptations
pp 97-99 Author: O'Callaghan, Dr. Claire
Research Articles
No Atom Rendered Void: The Aerial and Alchemical Enchantment of Wuthering Heights
pp. 100-117 Author: Duell, Meg
Abstract:
This article maps how elemental and meteorological metaphysics function in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), arguing that the novel’s complex recursive structure is facilitated through an alchemical process by which the collision of air and materiality—the transcendent elements embodied by Catherine and Heathcliff—activates psychic, spatial, mortal and temporal ‘wandering’. These points of elemental friction, defined here as ‘portals of enchantment’, connect their subjects with past and future iterations of themselves and others. Additionally, it explores how the novel’s elemental ‘portals’ extend beyond spatial thresholds into aerial and avian touchstones, allowing Brontë to infuse the novel with folkloric subtext..
This Rustic Muse: Developing a Political Voice in the Poetry of Patrick Brontë
pp. 118-134 Author: Avery, Simon
Abstract:
This article examines a range of the Reverend Patrick Brontë’s poetry—a much neglected body of work in Brontë criticism—and argues that it was here that Brontë was able to develop a political voice and a sense of literature as a vehicle for political exploration and debate. In considering Brontë’s two collections, Cottage Poems (1811) and The Rural Minstrel (1813), in the contexts of war abroad and industrial, economic and social unrest at home, this article explores what the poetry tells us about Brontë’s political thinking, his relationship with political structures and hierarchies, and his anxieties about political cohesion and security. What emerges is a poet whose work, written under the guise of his ‘rustic muse’, offers fascinating interventions into contemporaneous political debates regarding poverty, industrialisation, the city, community, the place of religion in society, nation-state formation and the nature of liberty and equality more generally.
Reading Jane Eyre as a Hagiographic Romance
pp. 28-43 Author: Schiavone, Matteo
Abstract:
This article uses queer medievalism as a critical method to interpret Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), reading it as a hagiographic romance, a hybrid text that blurs clear-cut generic boundaries. As the fictionalised autobiography of a character who finds the strength of self-belief through mystical experiences and the Christian doctrine of endurance, the narrative is akin to medieval hagiographic and visionary literature, which the comparison with The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1430s) demonstrates. At the same time, however, similar to Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, it follows the pattern of a chivalric quest romance, as Jane physically moves outwards and goes through several stages of development before being ready to marry Mr Rochester. Ultimately, queered genres create a space where Jane can develop a queer gender identity beyond stifling societal expectations.‘To give the passage quite a contrary turn’: Female Religious Authority and Subversive Hermeneutics in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley
pp. 132-152 Author: Wiegand, Holly
Abstract:
This article argues for a reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) as a historiography of women’s challenges to androcentric Anglican structures of authority and measures of biblical interpretation. Shirley stages the possibility and precarity of women’s public religious authority amid socio-religious discourses, underscoring the relationship between Shirley and Caroline as a space for proto-feminist theological and interpretive revisions. Attending to Brontë’s heroine’s push against religious exclusivism foregrounds Caroline’s often-overlooked hermeneutic turns in her dispute with mill overseer Joe Scott, Brontë’s mouthpiece for inherited anti-woman Anglican interpretations. This article contends that class and gender inflect the act and reception of biblical interpretation for Brontë, playing out historical debates about women’s preaching and discussions about working-class Dissenting groups that supported women’s ministries, such as Methodism. It nuances Brontë’s views on the role of women in religion as she too is pulled between traditional dogma and radical woman-centred hermeneutics along class lines.‘Are you not a little severe?’: Lucy’s Wit in Her Narrative Voice in Villette
pp. 153-166 Author: Zhang, Zhiying
Abstract:
This article provides a new perspective on Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), analysing the function of wit through the lens of psychoanalytic and comic theories. Primarily based on Freud’s theory of wit, the analysis examines various wit-making techniques, exploring how Lucy employs these methods as a means of self-expression and critique. The use of wit breaks the serious narrative tone, creating a comic effect that allows readers to enjoy the story and empathise with Lucy’s painful experiences. It also allows Lucy to release her suppressed emotional pain and struggles within her narrative. By demonstrating how wit is integral to Lucy’s journey of self-discovery and self-expression, this article contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation about comic elements in Brontë’s writing.Heathcliff, Harry and Hardin: After as a New Layer to Wuthering Heights
pp. 167-183 Author: de Beus, Emma
Abstract:
This article considers Anna Todd’s After series (2013–2015) as a new adaptive layer to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). It explores the relationship between the two works by considering the adaptive history and context of Wuthering Heights before moving onto an analysis of After, examining its multiple points of origin. The analysis includes fanfiction, the boy band One Direction and other influences on After, both classical and contemporary. The article then undertakes close readings of Wuthering Heights and After to establish clear points of connection and overarching parallels, arguing that a reading of After exposes it as a hitherto unrecognised adaptation of Wuthering Heights. By shedding light on this relationship, it is possible to better understand how Emily Brontë’s novel has found an increasingly varied afterlife in the twenty-first century—one that both speaks to the contemporary climate and reflects new understandings of the novel itself.Book ReviewsA Brontë Reading List: 2023
pp. 184-195 Reviewed by Pearson, Sara L. & Cook, Peter
Abstract:
This reading list is an annotated bibliography of scholarly and critical work on the Brontës published in 2023. We have attempted to compile a comprehensive list of resources by consulting the MLA International Bibliography, Academic Search Complete, and the Brontë Blog (http://bronteblog.blogspot.com). Book chapters and scholarly articles on the Brontës are included except those articles published in Brontë Studies. Entire books on the Brontës are in the reviews section of this journal. The author’s initials in brackets are provided after each annotation.
The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery
pp. 195-198 Reviewed by Ayrton, Tricia
Brontë Women’s Writing Festival, 26–28 September 2025
pp. 198-200 Reviewed by Dawn Gant, Rose
A Vain Talent? The Question of Female Artistry in the Life and Work of Anne Brontë
pp. 200-202 Reviewed by Sanders, Valerie
Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel. Injured Minds, Ruined Lives
pp. 202-204 Reviewed by Seijo-Richart, María
The Banagher Brontë Group Festival, Ireland, 15–18 August 2025
pp. 205-207 Reviewed by Wilcock, Joanne
AnnouncementBrontë Studies Early Career Research Essay Prize 2026
pp. 208-209 by O'Callagahn, Claire
The mounting number of biographies of Emily is a testament to her elusiveness. Like a moth, she has been caught, chloroformed and staked onto the page many times over, but always with a new label. First, she was a genius recluse, then a wild spirit, and more recently an agoraphobic anorexic. But as Emily herself put it, ‘Vain are the thousand creeds’, ‘worthless as withered weeds’: she is not a woman who stays pinned for long. It is refreshing, therefore, that in Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë, she has dispensed with these deadening labels, with what she calls the ‘twentieth and twenty-first-century ideas and identities [that] don’t import easily into the past’. Instead, she sets out simply to render the ‘texture’ of Emily’s days, ‘to ponder what she wore, saw, heard, smelled, and felt along her skin’.This tactile approach, a method Lutz developed in her earlier book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, is employed to great effect. The Haworth Parsonage, with its graveside aspect, rears up darkly before our eyes, and the smell of its peat fires, of the various dogs and cats, of tallow candles and pungent bedpans wafts out from the page. With only four rooms, it was a crowded home for its many inhabitants, but when we learn that every member of the family aspired to be a writer, the space feels smaller still. What could be seen represented only a sliver of the bustling reality of this house, in which whole universes were dreamt up by children who found as much freedom in them as they did on the wild Yorkshire moors. Goethe wrote that ‘talents are best nurtured in solitude’, but it was among the chiming clocks and creaking floorboards of this cramped and dimly lit parsonage that three great writers were born.Given that creativity in the Brontë family was always a collaborative affair, no biography of Emily could consider her in isolation from her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, or from her wayward brother, Branwell. Even the ghosts of her mother and her two older sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, were ever present – their successive burials in the family vault having had a profound effect on the minds of the surviving children. Emily was not, then, as Lutz explains, the isolated genius of the Brontë myth but connected, as though by a series of ‘underground rivers’, to a shared familial source. Lutz is particularly good at setting out the various components of this spring of intellectual and creative life: Blackwood’s Magazine with its dungeon tales, Irish folk stories, the well-stocked library at Ponden House with its pornographic volumes, copies of Byron, of de Sade, of Virgil, of Horace, books on geometry, and a well-thumbed History of British Birds representing only a fraction of their shared reading. Like Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen before them, George Eliot and, later, Virginia Woolf, the Brontë sisters had the run of their father’s library but with very little guidance. It was in this permissive atmosphere, and out of the tomes of a patriarchal culture, that they would make something entirely their own.While Lutz is attentive to this shared life, she tries not to lose sight of Emily for too long. We glimpse her ‘peripatetic creativity’ in the image of her reading while kneading dough, or writing on palm-sized pieces of paper that could be secreted away in an apron; we get a sense of her fierce stoicism from the story of the dog bite wound that she seared with a red-hot iron; from the various descriptions of her animals – including her intimidating mastiff, Keeper, and her wild falcon, Nero – we see a woman who gloried ‘in the ferociousness of nature’; and in her stream-of-consciousness-like journals and academic essays we recognise the cast of that original mind that would go on to write poetry like ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’, and create the dark, primordial world of Wuthering Heights.But these are only glimpses, occasional flashes of illumination in a biography that otherwise contains a large amount of speculative padding. Few paragraphs go by that don’t pose unanswerable questions (‘Was Emily a whistler?’, ‘did she make herself sick, perhaps by not eating?’), and the phrase ‘she may have’ is used as reflexively as a full stop. Large swathes of conjecture about what Emily might have seen or done (often based on Charlotte’s experiences) serve as descriptive stepping stones when the facts are too thin on the ground. And a lengthy plot summary of Wuthering Heights reads like a narrative sleight of hand, meant to distract us from the fact that, with no original manuscript, we will never know how it was written. Obscured by a blizzard of unanswered questions and hypothetical experiences, Emily appears just as she did in her self-portraits: with her back to us, a subject who does not want to be known.Quoting Julian Barnes, Lutz prefaces This Dark Night by asserting that all biography is ‘a collection of holes tied together with a string’, and that ‘with Emily Brontë this is doubly true’. However, whether a biographer succeeds depends entirely on how she chooses to bridge the gaps. Were it only that Lutz relied too heavily on conjecture about what Emily saw or felt, it would merely be a frustrating book; but because her speculation extends to how Emily washed and with what material she managed her menstruation, it is a fundamentally flawed one. Never mind that no biographer of a male author would think to ask how he trimmed his nasal hair or applied his haemorrhoid cream, Lutz seems to have forgotten that her subject is the sublime poet who wrote: ‘I am happiest when most away / I can bear my soul from its home of clay’. She can look for Emily in her slop pails as much as she likes. She will not find her there.Virginia Woolf wrote that ‘there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights’, but she could equally have written that there was no ‘I’ in Emily Brontë. Like the bluebell, which Emily called a sacred watcher, she observed the world unhindered by the blot of the self – saw it as if from the falcon’s untethered eye, as if from some far-flung perch in the boundless universe.It is no wonder she remains so elusive. (Charlotte Stroud)
With its plethora of independent stores and coffee shops, walking up the village’s Main Street towards the Bronte Parsonage in 2026 is, of course, a very different experience to how it would have been when those three writerly sisters called it home.But now the village has been faithfully recreated as it would have been in the 1840s - in miniature.Paul Crossley is a volunteer at the Parsonage, and his impressive diorama, some three years in the making, merges his two passions: model making and the history of the Bronte family.A fan since being mesmerised by The Brontës of Haworth TV series in 1973, he has a particular interest in Branwell Bronte, who struggled with addiction.“I was reading one of Ann Dinsdale’s fabulous books about the Brontës. She’s the curator of the Parsonage and in the book was a map of how the street would have looked in the 1840s,” Mr Crossley explained.“And it got me to thinking, what if I could make a model of that? I’ve been doing model making for 60 years now and it’s almost a kind of illness.”Using a scale of 2mm to a foot, Paul recreated the maps on his kitchen floor, sellotaping A4 pieces of paper together to work out the exact layout of his planned village.“Lots of the buildings described have since been demolished,” he explained “So I had to use my imagination - I see myself as a bit of a frustrated architect.”The Parsonage, the Sunday School and Haworth’s Church tower are all recognisable in Paul’s diorama, although he had to do some digging to ensure accuracy, particularly in the case of the church, which was partially rebuilt in the 1870s.“I decided I was going to base the diorama in the year 1845, which was a milestone year in the Brontë saga. Patrick [the writers’ vicar father] had got himself a new curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who would go on to become Charlotte’s husband,” he said.“It was also the year Anne resigned her job, Branwell got sacked and Charlotte discovered Emily’s poetry.”Paul’s commitment to accuracy even stretched as far as ensuring replicas of gravestones were in keeping with the year he chose.He brought his diorama to the Parsonage for a short display, where he was told by one staff member that she’d “never been able to visualise Victorian Haworth, but now she saw it in an instant.”A spokesperson for the Brontë Parsonage said: “Paul has been a dedicated and valued volunteer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for many years. We really admire the time and skill which he has put into this remarkable model, and we're all delighted that he's receiving recognition for his work.” (Victoria Finan)
Jackie was nominated because of her long-standing love of classic literature and old films, as well as a dream she had held for years of visiting Haworth, where Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë lived.In her nomination, Rosemary explained how much the trip would mean.She wrote: “Jackie has never been to Haworth and would dearly love to see where the Brontë sisters lived and the surrounding countryside which inspired their novels.“Jackie does not get out and about very much, and this experience would mean so much to her, and would be something she would remember and talk about for the rest of her life.”When Jackie learned she had been selected, Rosemary said she was “beaming” as she began planning what souvenirs she might bring back from the trip.The day was made possible by Marcus Edwards, a personal travel consultant and long-time supporter of Making Space, who volunteered to organise the visit and cover all associated costs for Jackie and Rosemary.Marcus said: “I am so happy to be able to support the work that Making Space does in the community to improve the lives of those who need a friendly face, a helping hand or some much-needed company and kindness.“I was really touched by this lady’s story and wanted to provide an experience that would make her smile, provide an opportunity for a break and for her to make some happy memories in a place she really wanted to visit.”During the day, Jackie explored the famous cobbled streets of Haworth, visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum and enjoyed lunch in one of the village’s cafés before travelling to nearby Thornton to learn more about the Brontë family’s early life.Reflecting on the experience, Jackie said: “I enjoyed every part of the day.“The Brontë Parsonage was wonderful, and I loved listening to the guide at the museum in Thornton.“I especially loved the Old Curiosity Shop. It looked like something from an old movie with chandeliers, beautiful mirrors and all the herbal soaps, lotions and potions. I absolutely adored it.“Thank you for everything. It was a very special day that I will always remember.”Rosemary added: “Jackie is a very thoughtful and reserved person, but it was clear how much the experience meant to her.“She kept saying how much she had enjoyed the day and really took everything in."It was wonderful to see her experience something she had wanted to do for such a long time.” (Safiyyah Tayyeb)
Brontë Event Space in the Old School RoomSat 30 May, 10:00am
Join us for a relaxing day of meditation, yoga and creativity as we welcome back Emma Conally-Barklem to the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Emma is an author, poet and yoga teacher based in Yorkshire. She has taught yoga for fourteen years both home and away. Her classes are creative, fun and led with kindness offering options for everybody who wishes to practice.
Time Activity 10:00–11:00 Welcome / Intros / Grounding Brontë Meditation — 'Taking Flight' yoga session (suitable for all, including complete beginners!) in Parson's Field (weather permitting or in the BPM learning space) 11:00–12:00 Talk on writing The High Flight: 50 Poems Inspired by Emily Brontë's Hawk, Brontë treasures and the Diary Papers — including author Q&A 12:00–13:00 Group lunch at Cobbles & Clay, or bring your own packed lunch 13:00–14:15 Writing Narrative Voice workshop 14:15–14:45 'Nesting' restorative yoga session 14:45–15:00 Further resources & farewells
As a filmmaker and historian, I’m fascinated by the ways in which cinema has been used as a propaganda tool. I thought about this when Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights came out, and even before I had seen it I sensed there was something else happening, from the clips shared on social media to the promotional images of pale-skinned Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi striking a pose reminiscent of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind. I kept thinking about what the appeal of that cinematic past was, and how it found an audience in contemporary culture. Surely there’d been enough adaptations of this book to last us an eternity.I’m familiar with Fennell’s work and her background as a former actor from an upper-middle-class family (her family used to holiday with Andrew Lloyd Webber), who has successfully moved into filmmaking. I took this context into account when watching her interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel. Despite its box office success on release earlier this year, it has been widely panned by critics for various reasons, including the apparent whitewashing of Heathcliff, which distorts a core tension of what has made the book endure for so long. One Letterboxd reviewer put it bluntly: “Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis 177 years ago yet this adaptation is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her.” This film is simply erotica dressed up as a love story.In 1975, Susan Sontag wrote “Fascinating Fascism”, an essay in which she took aim at silent-film-actor-turned-filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, arguing that, in the making of Nazi propaganda films such as Triumph of the Will, she exploited the tools of cinema to seduce the viewer. “Fascinating Fascism” covers other Riefenstahl works, including the photography book The Last of the Nuba, which clearly wasn’t state-sponsored propaganda, but was, Sontag argued, “continuous with her Nazi work”. What I’m drawn to is the argument about fascist aesthetics that Sontag made in relation to Riefenstahl’s films, which she describes as “epics of achieved community, in which everyday reality is transcended through ecstatic self-control and submission”.I kept thinking about ecstasy and submission after watching Wuthering Heights, and how captivating it is to the viewer. Sontag wrote that fascist iconography carries a seductive visual power that operates independently of ideology:In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a “spiritual” force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic (that is, women) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse.The aesthetics of power, hierarchy and the erasure of the individual, Sontag argued, can produce erotic as well as political responses, and those two responses share a common structure: beauty and domination are entangled in fascist art.Fascist aesthetics are also obsessed with race. As Sontag wrote, Riefenstahl’s Nuba portraits evoke “some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and mental, the joyful and the critical”.In Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, this choice is illustrated by the decision to change the brown ringlets of Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw to Robbie’s very blonde version on screen. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has argued that “blonde” has come to signify whiteness without being explicit: “We use ‘blonde’ (and if to a lesser extent ‘brunette’) to signal that someone is white without using a racialized term like ‘white’. It may also be more: a signifier of a type of white person.” [...]Nostalgia is another signifier of these politics. The choice to yet again adapt a 19th century novel that has had at least eight adaptations is a curious one. Brontë wrote the book at the end of the Industrial Revolution, a period of significant social and economic transformation. That context sits at the heart of the novel, and defanging it is telling. In 2011, another Englishwoman remade Wuthering Heights, in a film that captures the brutality of that period and the tension at the heart of the novel. In Andrea Arnold’s rendering, Catherine is a brunette, Heathcliff is Black and the Yorkshire moors are anything but sentimental.Robbie, who is also a producer on the latest incarnation, dismissed the criticism the film received, arguing at a panel event at the Sydney Opera House: “I consider audience always. I’ve never, ever been on set and thought, What are the critics going to think of this? I’m like, what’s an audience going to feel right now? What’s their emotional response going to be? I just believe you should make movies for the people who are buying the tickets to see the movies.”While I respect her honesty, I do wonder if seduction is what audiences need at this moment in history. Because what the audience is asking for, and what Fennell’s Wuthering Heights delivers with incredible visual precision, is exactly what Sontag identified half a century ago: the eroticisation of domination. The pleasure of surrender to a force larger and more overwhelming than oneself. The landscapes are cinematically breathtaking, Elordi is shirtless, Robbie gorgeous in the costumes. This is a film that is concerned with vibes and wants to seduce its audience with this imagery.Again, Sontag wrote that fascist aesthetics “flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behaviour, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude … Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.”While people watching films and clips on social media may not be thinking about these things, those creating them understand the power that images have in myth-making, and that they are not neutral. [...]In Fennell’s adaptation, audiences are given a visually stunning film layered with nostalgia and a sense of collective identity, all centred on a work of major cultural significance. Rather than encourage people to question the very structures Brontë was seeking to analyse in her novel, the movie brings people together to engage in the spectacle of a romance stripped of its politics. Love is an enduring narrative that many can relate to. For the film’s duration, moviegoers are seduced and don’t feel powerless at a time when the world outside is so overwhelming.Those who enjoy films such as Fennell’s (much like those readers who have made the “romantasy” genre a billion-dollar publishing industry) are not fascists, nor are they passive or unsophisticated. They are largely online, politically aware and living through a moment of profound institutional decline. The old structures of economic security, political legitimacy and faith in the future have all but failed. What capitalism is offering them is what Benjamin diagnosed: aesthetic expression in place of structural change and maintaining the status quo.Neither Fennell’s Wuthering Heights nor romantasy novels will dismantle racism or classism, or lower the price of petrol. If anything, they reinforce heteronormative gender roles and hierarchies. But they do offer audiences something politicians are incapable of: a temporary reprieve from the madness of the world for two hours or so.The fantasy of submission, whether to a lover, a racial identity, a landscape, the algorithm or even a political force, is essentially the fantasy of being relieved of one’s responsibility to the world. The audience does not want to be in control; it wants to surrender it completely. And exponents of fascist aesthetics, as Sontag argued, have always understood this with uncomfortable precision.Viewers whose algorithms are tuned to “tradwife content”, “glow up” trends and “soft life” escapism, or reading romantasy books and watching Wuthering Heights, aren’t being recruited or radicalised. They are being distracted and comforted as they live through these tumultuous times.This is what art can tell us about something it pretends to be unaware of. It is for future historians to give language to the aesthetics that will come to define the art that speaks to the politics and ideology of these times. But right now, it is worth remembering that good art reflects back our humanity, and shows us the world in its truth. (Santilla Chingaipe)
